Oracle Blog

Blog for bigadmin

Tuesday Mar 23, 2010

Did you just bring down the entire executive staff on your head because while you were eating a hot pastrami on rye your cell phone played Ina Gada Da Vida, the ring tone you reserved for that exotic DBA with the naughty look you met at the Thailand Oracle User Group last week while you were 'sposed to be talking to potential clients, you slacker, and in your haste to grab the call, you gripped the rye bread too hard, squeezing out a giant glob of mustard that landed square in your lap just as you were trying to say "Hey" all cool and smooth like you knew how to handle that kinda woman, so while she purred something innocuous but not, you lodged the cell phone between your shoulder and ear so you could reach for the only piece of paper on your desk, the copy of the presentation you have to deliver in 8 minutes, so you could try to clean off the mustard spot because IT guys tend to make a better impression on customers when they don't show up with a giant mustard stain in the middle of their dress slacks, but while reaching for the presentation you wound up smacking the Esc key with your elbow and canceling the installation of the software that takes 28 minutes to install that you were going to demo with the presentation you are going to make in what, 7 minutes now?

Edward Clay, the author, has distilled a career's worth of sound advice into one white paper. He begins by listing the typical errors that are repeated by unsuccessful customer engagements, such as:

Confusion about tactical sales versus strategic sales

Poor communication about the final deployed solution

Scope creep

Confusion about when to use a time-and-materials versus fixed-pricing engagement

Regulatory or fiduciary requirements and security requirements not addressed or addressed late in the architecture design or deployment process

Current internal IT practices (that is, IT maturity level) not addressed during the development of the solution nor for the final state

And more

He then goes on to provides ways to avoid these problems in your customer engagements, with wisdom and techniques born of experience. I found the section on the risks and benefits of tactical vs strategic sales wicked interesting. And the section on the maturity level of a site's security infrastructure was terrific.

Complete contents are:

The Sales Process: Product Sales Versus Solution Sales

The Scope of the Project

Communication During the Delivery and the Handoff

Time-and-Material Versus Fixed-Price Delivery

IT Maturity Level

Security Maturity Level

Pre-sales and Delivery Architecture

The Role of Security Architecture

The Pros and Cons of Using Partners

Documentation and Customer Training for Products

This is a great read, whether you deal directly with customer's IT problems or not.